Electricity does not have to be cased up inside slick metal enclosures; we can also let it flow through painted pine-cones, carved traces, and the water in our bodies. The segregation of our abilities into discrete disciplines leaves gray areas to be explored and missing links to be made. This workshop will provide you with a time and place to disrupt your own practice by introducing new materials, tools, techniques, and places of making -with a focus on introducing electricity as a material property that can be used to create interactive crafts.

Carbon Nature – Carbon coated seed pods. Strung from copper threads. Hanging on a burnt branch. They clash in silence, but their contact is detected. What follows? Must every physical interaction have digital consequences?

natural & artificial

indoors & outdoors

We will strap our tools to our bodies and walk outside the studio to explore how our practice is affected by what lies beyond the familiar infrastructures of making. We will discover new materials, and expose our practices to outside views.

A Wearable Studio Practice – a collection of wearable and portable items that make it easier to become nomadic in your practice of making and manipulating the world.

craft & engineering

Combining the material and aesthetic motivations of craftsmanship with the applied and functional drive for developing ever new technologies… we might discover these fields are not as different as they seem.

About the instructor….

Hannah Perner-Wilson combines conductive materials and craft techniques, developing new styles of building electronics that emphasize materiality and process. She received a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from the University for Art and Industrial Design Linz and an M.Sc. in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, where she was a student in the High-Low Tech research group. Her thesis work focused on developing, documenting, and disseminating a Kit-of-No-Parts approach to building electronics.

Since 2006 Hannah has collaborated with Mika Satomi, forming the collective KOBAKANT. Together they maintain an online database titled How To Get What You Want, where they share their textile sensor designs and DIY approach to E-Textiles. Ever since returning from an expedition to the jungle of southern Madagascar, Hannah has been building herself a Wearable Studio Practice that allows her to be mobile in her practice of making and manipulating the world. Most recently, in 2017/18, KOBAKANT are running KOBA, an e-textile tailor shop in Berlin, Germany as an experiment in what people want wearable technology technology to be for them.

For the last ten years I’ve been working in electronics textiles, also known as e-textiles. It’s a hybrid field of craft and technology that combines knowledge and skill from electrical engineering and textile design. It is still a space without standardized solutions, and working within it has both caused and allowed me to question conventions and cultures surrounding technology production and use. With my own contributions to this field I try to expand our ways of understanding, creating, and using technology, breaking with the image of electronics as industrially produced consumer goods and presenting them instead as an expressive medium, a cultural practice, something to take care of in making and using.